Hey everyone,

First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):

- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)

Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).

We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:

- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.

- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.

- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.

- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.

- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.

There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.

We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.

2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.

Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim

I feel a bit ashamed posting this, compared to some of the amazing things you guys have built.
Coolest thing I have built was my first app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
Story:
It was back around new years 2014-2015. I bought a charango and started playing some gigs. I carried around a book with chords. I thought it was a bit annoying to have to take it with me. Looked for an app and there wasn't any (today there are 2-3 other). So I decided to make an app.
Bare in mind that I had just a bit of experience with C from university. No OOP. So I went on youtube and started watching some tutorials while I developed it. Learned by trying. Trial and error.
After around 2-3 months of working on it every day after class until going to sleep, it was ready.
I decided to put it on play store for other people to use. Turns out there was a need. I got 10,000 downloads in less than half a year (it is quite a niche, so unexpected). Since then it has stayed around 6000 installs on active devices.
It is my biggest personal project success.
Since then, I have continued making apps in my free time, getting better and more professional. But none has come even close to that ones popularity. My plan is that to mark the 5th anniversary, I am working on a v2.0 (complete rewrite) with new features and instruments.
Sorry about tl;dr

Buckle up, it's a long one.

Let me tell you why "Tree Shaking" is stupidity incarnate and why Rich Harris needs to stop talking about things he doesn't understand.

For reference, this is a direct response to the 2015 article here: https://medium.com/@Rich_Harris/...

"Tree shaking", as Rich puts it, is NOT dead code removal apparently, but instead only picking the parts that are actually used.

However, Rich has never heard of a C compiler, apparently. In C (or any systems language with basic optimizations), public (visible) members exposed to library consumers must have that code available to them, obviously. However, all of the other cruft that you don't actually use is removed - hence, dead code removal.

How does the compiler do that? Well, it does what Rich calls "tree shaking" by evaluating all of the pieces of code that are used by any codepaths used by any of the exported symbols, not just the "main module" (which doesn't exist in systems libraries).

It's the SAME FUCKING THING, he's just not researched enough to fully fucking understand that. But sure, tell me how the javascript community apparently invented something ELSE that you REALLY just repackaged and made more bloated/downright wrong (React Hooks, webpack, WebAssembly, etc.)

Speaking of Javascript, "tree shaking" is impossible to do with any degree of confidence, unlike statically typed/well defined languages. This is because you can create artificial references to values at runtime using string functions - which means, with the right input, almost anything can be run depending on the input.

How do you figure out what can and can't be? You can't! Since there is a runtime-based codepath and decision tree, you run into properties of Turing's halting problem, which cannot be solved completely.

With stricter languages such as C (which is where "dead code removal" is used quite aggressively), you can make very strong assertions at compile time about the usage of code. This is simply how C is still thousands of times faster than Javascript.

So no, Rich Harris, dead code removal is not "silly". Your entire premise about "live code inclusion" is technical jargon and buzzwordy drivel. Empty words at best.

This sort of shit is annoying and only feeds into this cycle of the web community not being Special enough and having to reinvent every single fucking facet of operating systems in your shitty bloated spyware-like browser and brand it with flashy Matrix-esque imagery and prose.

Fuck all of it.

@Kiki and I built something (99.99% of the work was done by him only)

Since I was 6 month old, I was annoyed by Reddit's front page. While I liked how it remained same for everyone, there were a lot of unwanted subs filling the feed which didn't interest me and moreover were quite annoying.

Hence, I was thinking of a feature where we can filter out subs from the front page. I even made a post back in days and did not get a proper response.

I waited for Reddit to implement but they are just bloating the product now.

So night before yesterday, after I was done fantasising how I save the school from a terrorist attack, I got an idea.

A Chrome extension which can hide a list of subs or keywords we feed to it.

So if I add r/MakeMeSuffer to the list, extension should click on 'Hide' button on the post and it will no longer appear. Well this was the initial logic I had in mind.

I immediately pinged @Kiki and he was like he already has something similar. We experimented and with in an hour or two, he built an extension which worked better than I thought.

He implemented the dark theme as well. Kickasssss!!!!

So now we are here, to share with you and get your feedback on how we can improve this further.

Once the community responds to this, we are taking this to Product Hunt, Reddit, and @Kiki will also publish this on Chrome store.

We are really excited about this idea and many more. So let me know how you feel about this.

https://github.com/mvoloskov/hazmat

Incase you struggle with installation, HMU, after a lot of hand holding from the creator, I am now an expert in installing and managing Chrome extension 🤣🤣

I continue to be surprised that nobody has made a normal-user-friendly CLIP image search tool, except the one for iOS nobody seems to have heard of. It's been more or less possible since mid-2021, and clearly useful given the amount of people with somewhat janky implementations (like https://mse.osmarks.net/, my thing) which have proven quite helpful. I looked into it and determined that writing an actual desktop app which users can use is annoying, and so is doing inference of big models on random people's computers, but surely SOME people are okay with desktop app development even now.